You may want to reconsider your approach to getting volunteer engineers who give up their valuable time to answer questions.
Given all the moving parts that make up LoRaWAN, it is not as simple as creating a Dummies guide because all sorts of things could be going on.
The Dragino LoRa mini dev is basically an Arduino Pro Mini with a radio chip which is a combination I use a fair amount for appropriate applications. If you want to read this, you’ll see that it took me a while to get to grips with this hardware combination and that it does in fact work:
I think this entire thread has got in to a tailspin and about the only thing we haven’t looked at is the possibility that the hardware is compromised in some way. So rather than collectively banging our head against the wall, perhaps you could get a different device to try out - preferably one with more RAM & Flash.
One possibility is the Adafruit Feather M0 with RFM95. I know this works because I’m helping out someone on another thread (see here) so I have one on my desk working away quite happily. Note, you will need to add a connection to the board for it to work with LoRaWAN - all the details are on the Adafruit website.
Alternatively if you want to sidestep all the LoRaWAN challenges, then the Arduino MKR WAN 1310 has both a powerful processor and a dedicated LoRaWAN module that will take care of LoRaWAN code for you, but you will still need to configure it.